1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to radar display systems and, more particularly, to a system for displaying radar images with other symbology.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional radar display system utilizes various hardware components to generate a colored radar display image. A receiver receives radar energy from a radar antenna and converts the radar energy into radial intensity values from one radial (angle) of the radar antenna during a radar scan in polar coordinate format. Successive radials make up a complete scan. In order to display these radial intensity values, a scan converter converts the radial intensity values from polar coordinate format to Cartesian coordinate format, and converts each of the radial intensity values into color information. The scan converter stores the values and the color information to permit display of a complete image at one time despite the slow scan of the radar antenna. A scaler subsequently compresses or expands the radial information to the desired display size. A symbology merger, which, along with the scan converter and the scalar can be a separate ASIC or FPGA device, merges the RGB radar colors with symbology of the display to generate a complete display image.
However, the above-discussed conventional radar display system has a high associated cost due to the various hardware components required, and fails to take advantage of hardware and software capabilities of the general purpose graphics hardware included in most computer systems. Also, the cost of dedicated hardware leads to compromises in the quality of the displayed images. For example, repeating pixels or lines is an inexpensive way of scaling the image, but produces blocky images.
Therefore, what is needed is a system that can generate quality radar images while using a minimum of dedicated hardware beyond the general-purpose graphics hardware used to generate the additional symbology.
In view of the above, the present invention provides a display system including a main memory and a receiver for receiving radially scanned radar data in a defined format, for converting the radially scanned radar data into range bin data sets and for writing the range bin data sets into the main memory. A graphics renderer maps these range bin data sets onto display primitives, generating a textured bit mapped image of the range bin data sets. A processor loads the range bin data sets from the main memory into the graphics renderer and controls the operation of the graphics renderer.
Through the above configuration, the radar display system of the present invention reduces the amount of hardware, and therefore the cost, of providing radar images on a display, as the scan conversion process is handled by hardware that is already part of commercially available general-purpose graphics hardware rather than by more expensive system specific hardware components.